‘Cast aside’ by France
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: The family of one of the boys whose death sparked two weeks of rioting in France tells the Star about years of repression and alienation
CLICHY- SOUS- BOIS, FRANCE—
Bouna Traore’s mother was cooking his favourite dish when the lights went out in her neighbourhood.
This was no ordinary blackout in the impoverished La Pama district on the outskirts of Paris.
Just a short walk from the apartment, 15- year-old Bouna lay dead, electrocuted after hiding from police inside a transformer in an electrical substation, triggering the blackout. Also burnt to death was his friend and soccer mate, Zyed Benna, 17.
“ She never thought that it was because her son had died,” Bana Traore, Bouna’s 22- year- old sister, said in an interview yesterday.
Reports that police had chased two teenagers to their deaths spread quickly through the complex of four-storey apartment buildings that evening of Oct. 27. Within hours, youths began burning cars and confronting police in violent protests that would spread to cities across France, forcing the government to impose a state of emergency and casting a glare of publicity on festering problems of immigration and discrimination.
Facing unrest not seen since the student riots of the 1960s, some French towns are now locked down by nighttime curfews after more than 6,000 cars were torched and 1,500 people detained.
The accidental deaths of Bouna and Zyed, and the two weeks of unrest they triggered, have turned the teenagers into symbols of France’s failure to integrate its citizens of ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly its 5 million Muslims.
Aside from a statement last Friday by Bouna’s brother Siyakah urging calm, the family has not spoken publicly about Bouna’s death and the chaos that followed.
Yesterday, his parents accompanied his body back to their ancestral African village of Diaguly in Mauritania. They brought all of Bouna’s clothes to distribute, according to the custom of their village, to people poorer than themselves. Bouna will be buried next to his grandfather, who settled in France after fighting as a French soldier with Allied forces in World War II.
“ When they needed us in the war, they used Africans as shields for the French soldiers by putting us on the front lines. Now that they don’t need us any more, they cast us aside,” said Bouna’s aunt, Fatoumata. Her anger stems from a life on the margins of French society, where ethnic minorities often live segregated in impoverished neighbourhoods on the outskirts of cities, struggling with unemployment and dropout rates significantly higher than the national average.
At the housing estate Bouna called home, the walls are scrawled with graffiti tributes: “ Bouna rest in peace.”
Bouna’s father, Seydou, works as a street cleaner for the city of Paris and his mother, Tonkhonte, does odd jobs when she can. Together they were able to buy their apartment in La Pama, a private housing complex filled with residents of Arab, African and Turkish backgrounds. Bouna was one of 11 children in his family, all born in Paris and most still living in their threebedroom apartment. He was a gifted soccer player and dreamed of one day becoming a professional. He loved rap music, dancing and looking good.
“ He was always looking at himself in the mirror,” Bana said. Bana said her brother was well integrated. But her aunt describes him as caught between two worlds.
“ The children born here are rejected by both sides: In France they see them as Africans and in Africa they’re seen as French,” said Fatoumata, 40. The day he died, Bouna walked to a nearby middle- class neighbourhood to meet his friends for a game of soccer.
“ That neighbourhood has everything — tennis courts, soccer field, cinemas, a clinic. Here, we have nothing,” Bana said. What happened after the game finished is unclear. Bana said her brother and his friends were simply hanging out in a group when police arrived in a hurry. Startled, the teenagers ran, eager to avoid identity checks that youths say often lead to long interrogations.
“ My brother was never in trouble with the police, but he was afraid of them,” Bana said. “ The truth is that the police here are usually violent. They have no respect for us.”
Police say they arrived to investigate a break- in at a construction site. Six youths were arrested and later released.
Police insist they didn’t chase Bouna and two of his friends into the electrical station. But one of the youths who survived the accident, 17- year- old Muttin Altun, has said through his lawyer that they did. “The police knew that they were chasing them into someplace dangerous,” said Bana. “ They should have just stopped chasing them. They should have protected them instead.” Bana said police didn’t inform the family of the accident. Her parents learned of it when Bouna’s friends knocked on the door with the news, about 21⁄ hours after his death.
Bouna’s father raced to the scene of the accident.
“ He wanted his son to get up for him. He couldn’t believe that
his son was dead,” said
Bana, whose family has
called for an independent inquiry into the
deaths. “We thought
the riots were crazy.
They won’t bring back
my brother; they won’t solve anything,” Bana said.
Like many young people in the Paris suburbs, Bana believes the riots were fuelled by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy describing impoverished and segregated neighbourhoods as places that had to be cleaned of “ scum.”
She’s taking courses to become a medical secretary. In the meantime, she said she has difficulty even finding work as a cleaner. She said employers will often tell her over the telephone that they have work and ask her to forward a CV.
“ I send it and I never hear back. I’m sure it’s because I have an African name. There’s racism in everything in France, in housing, jobs, school — everything,” she said.
She’s spent her whole life in France, but since her brother’s death, she’s not sure if she can continue calling it home.
“ If things remain as racist as they are, if we continue to be rejected as French citizens, maybe I’ll have to move,” she said.